Letting Go of McVeigh

By Jeff Goodell

Published: May 13, 2001

Correction Appended

'I wanted to stick my thumbs into Timothy McVeigh's windpipe and crush his larynx,'' says Patrick Reeder, sitting at a table in a McDonald's in Oklahoma City on a gray Saturday afternoon. Fifteen feet away, children are throwing French fries and swimming in a sea of plastic balls, oblivious to our conversation. ''You die very slowly that way,'' Reeder continues. ''You basically suffocate.'' He is a strong, wiry 40-year-old man who spent 14 years in the Marine Corps and now teaches football at a local high school. You get the feeling he knows what he's talking about. ''But before he was gone,'' Reeder adds, his eyes burning, ''I wanted to take out a knife and begin slicing off parts of his anatomy, starting with his most private parts first.''

When Timothy McVeigh bombed the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City on April 19, 1995, killing 168 people and injuring more than 500, Reeder lost his wife of 15 years, Michelle, as well as his mother-in-law, Ann Kreymborg. It took rescuers 15 days to dig their bodies out of the rubble. For the next several years, Reeder often thought about what he would do to McVeigh if he ever got the chance. Crushing his larynx was just one of many fantasies he played out in his head. For Reeder, it was a question of technique, not of morality. An Oklahoma-born conservative Republican and a longtime N.R.A. member, Reeder had been a supporter of the death penalty all his life. So had his wife. ''I felt like I owed it to Michelle to make sure McVeigh died for his crime,'' Reeder says. ''If I could have killed him myself, I would have.''

Reeder wasn't the only one. The day after the attack -- before McVeigh had even been charged -- President Clinton and Attorney General Janet Reno announced that they would seek the death penalty for whoever was convicted of this horrific act of terrorism. No one accused the president or the attorney general of perpetuating a barbaric form of punishment. Indeed, as recovery teams picked through the building debris, dragging out the mangled bodies of children who had been playing in the first-floor day-care center when the bomb exploded, execution seemed too good for whoever was responsible for this.

Six years later, that feeling remains. When McVeigh is pronounced dead on Wednesday morning at the federal penitentiary in Terre Haute, Ind. -- it will be the first federal execution in the United States in 38 years -- few heads will hang in mourning. Peggy Broxterman, whose son, Paul, was killed in the bombing, recently told The Daily Oklahoman, ''I literally want to see that boy on his way to hell.'' She will get her wish; Broxterman was selected as one of the 10 survivors and family members who will witness the execution from behind a glass wall. Some 285 others will watch McVeigh die via a closed-circuit video broadcast in Oklahoma City.

Any trace of forgiveness that angry survivors and relatives may have felt for McVeigh vanished when he recently referred to the 19 children killed in the bombing as ''collateral damage.'' Even those who have fought long and hard to end the death penalty in America see McVeigh's execution as a difficult cause. ''He is not a person of color, he is not retarded, he was represented by a competent lawyer and there is no question of his guilt,'' says Ajamu Baraka, director of Amnesty International's program to abolish the death penalty. ''It boils down to a moral argument, which is, Should the United States government be in the business of killing people or should it, like almost every other civilized country in the world, uphold the sanctity of life?''

For most of his life, Reeder thought he knew the answer to that question. But over the last six years, Reeder, like a handful of other survivors and family members, has gone on a long and painful journey through anger, hate and the nature of forgiveness. And he has come to what is, for him, a surprising conclusion: the execution of Timothy McVeigh is wrong. ''It is not about justice -- it is about revenge,'' Reeder says forcefully over the din of screaming children in McDonald's. ''It's blood lust. And if I don't stand up now and say this, well, it's just cowardice.''

In 1978, when Pat Reeder was 17 years old, he wrecked his father's car and broke his neck. It was just a hairline fracture, but it was still devastating to him, mostly because it meant he had to sit out his junior season with the Putnam City high-school football team in Oklahoma City. Discouraged, he watched the games from the stands, where he happened to meet a shy, dark-haired senior named Michelle. They fell in love and were married soon after graduation.

Reeder worked for a few months in a print shop, then decided to join the Marines. After boot camp in San Diego, he spent three years on sea duty, followed by three and a half years in the Philippines. He worked his way up to staff sergeant and was involved in various Marine operations overseas that he is still not at liberty to talk about. Michelle usually got a civil service job at whatever base he was stationed at. They took vacations all over the Far East: Singapore, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Thailand, Taiwan, China. ''We really got to see the world,'' Reeder says. After 14 years in the service, however, Reeder and Michelle were ready to head back to Oklahoma City. In the summer of 1994, Reeder retired from active duty, and they drove home in a two-car caravan, using walkie-talkies to communicate with each other on the highway. ''When we crossed the Oklahoma state line, we were both singing to each other on the walkie-talkies,'' Reeder remembers. ''We were very happy to be going home.''

Jeff Goodell, a contributing editor at Rolling Stone, is the author of ''Sunnyvale: The Rise and Fall of a Silicon Valley Family.''

Correction: May 13, 2001, Sunday An article on Page 40 of The Times Magazine today about Patrick Reeder, whose wife, Michelle, was killed in the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995, includes outdated references to the scheduled execution of Timothy J. McVeigh. On Friday, after the magazine had gone to press, Attorney General John Ashcroft postponed the execution until June 11.